Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, Charlotte Rampling, and Javier Bardem, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Christopher Walken and Léa Seydoux.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve

Warner Bros., out now

Paul Atreides unites with Chani and the Fremen while seeking revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family.

It’s still amazing to think that when Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part One was released in cinemas in 2021, Warner Brothers had not greenlit the second half of the story. Thankfully, the combination of a starry cast and epic filmmaking drew the public to the cinemas to make it a box office success so that the director could make the conclusion to his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic.

And what a conclusion it is. The word ‘definitive’ is bandied around far too often for my liking, but it is the most appropriate description of this adaptation. The first movie was already a spectacular achievement, and Part Two is even better. The story has really benefitted from being split into two, the first covering the Atreides family arriving on planet Arrakis and being attacked by conspiring forces, with young Paul (Timothee Chalamet) and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) escaping to the desert and joining the Fremen people.

We pick things up soon after, with Paul and Jessica establishing their places within their new community. Much time is spent discussing the prophecy of a chosen one who will lead the people to freedom, and no punches are pulled in the consideration of the carnage that this will likely leave behind. It’s a heady mix of religion, faith, the yoke of prophecies and the fear of what will be lost.

Rather cannily, Villeneuve saved some of the book’s characters for Part Two, with Christopher Walken (Emperor Shaddam), Austin Butler (Feyd-Rautha), Florence Pugh (Princess Irulan) and Lea Seydoux (Lady Fenring) making the cast even starrier. Some have more screen time than others, with Butler having great fun essaying the psychotic Harkonnen baron-in-waiting. An honourable mention also goes to Souheila Yacoub as new character Shishakli.

If Part One was heavy on the set-up, Part Two is all about the delivery, with spectacular battle scenes and high drama. The real desert locations are used to great effect, Hans Zimmer builds on his Oscar-winning score to Part One – indeed everything about this movie is epic. See it on the biggest screen possible – IMAX if you’re lucky; this really is the sort of movie that absolutely cries out to be seen at the cinema.

If there’s one downside to all of the above, it’s that this is a lot bleaker than we’ve come to expect in our blockbusters. Don’t expect a clear-cut triumph of good over evil or Ewok-style creations as balance is restored to the universe. There are villains in all quarters, and as those who have followed Herbert’s six-book series will know, the story of Dune is far from over.

Verdict: I doubt you’ll see a better film for some time – event cinema of the highest calibre. Let’s hope they we’ll soon get news about a third movie. 10/10

Nick Joy

 

Paul Atreides faces his future…

Later than we’d have liked but arriving nonetheless on the back of a grandfather worm, Dune: Part Two has breached the desert and made its way into cinemas.

In case you were sleeping under a rock, the first entry, directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring, among others, Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson and Javier Bardem, introduced us to Frank Herbet’s sci-fi space opera Dune, a mash up of the story of the real Lawrence of Arabia, the impact of European empires on the Middle East seen through the lens of Lord of the Rings and Flash Gordon.

Herbert built an intricate, detailed world full of politics, history and intrigue founded upon the rich details available to him in reading about the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula.

His story, while not profoundly anti-colonialist in a way we would define it today nevertheless saw pretty clearly into the nature of power, faith and empire. It also wrote candidly on how these three pillars intersect, normally for the worse.

If all that sounds like A LOT, then Villeneuve obviously thought so too and broke the first novel in Herbert’s cycle into two parts, with the first movie introducing us to the universe and covering, approximately, the first half of the book.

Dune: Part Two then picks up immediately following the end of the first film and remains concerned with many of its themes. That is, the way power corrupts all those who touch it, how the world can make choices for us regardless of our desires, the layered suffocating presence of empire and how it subverts and co-opts those it oppresses by taking their language and culture from them and turning it to its own interests.

Honestly, Dune: Part Two has a huge job to accomplish because the source material is extremely esoteric and complex. Part Two’s challenge is to finish the story in the book and much of that second part is, in movie parlance, a montage sequence of Paul Atreides learning to be Fremen, surviving in the desert and doing a Dances with Wolves.

All this is to say that getting this film right is a huge task with challenges across several areas.

Villeneuve opts for spectacle but he does so with a dreamlike quality that leaves much unsaid but clearly spoken. Ideas about empire, about the disaster of colonialism for the colonised, how saying a lie often enough can turn it into a truth arrive shown in background details, witty asides and actions that are explained with a single sentence.

The soundscape and visual aesthetics deliver in spades. Smashing us in the face with sandstorms where the sound itself does the work of the sand, grinding against our skin and making us feel every particle. This film is a sonic triumph.

It is also visually striking. You might think that a film set in a desert would have a one note palette but Villeneuve and his cinematographer Greig Fraser conjure up Black Suns, white fireworks, underground seas while using night and day to bring landscapes to the screen that tell you as much of the story as any dialogue, as any actor. Beyond Arrakis, the world of Dune is its own character.

There’re allusions to Tolkien’s Aragorn and his unwillingness to take up the crown of Gondor here but the fears are grounded differently. Paul Atreides knows that if he takes up the crown he will become the thing others made of him, that he will slip into plans and agendas beyond his control.

His aims, at times, seems to be to duck that inevitable outcome but when his hand is forced, to burn the world rather than accept his fate at others’ hands.

I understand the desire to wriggle and fight against the shape others would put us in but Villeneuve shows how this destroys those around us. It renders our friends into supporters, our loved ones into the shadows where they must accept our decisions rather than live with us.

Dune: Part Two is less melancholy than Part One but it is no less sad because its central theme under all the explosions and giant worms and spaceships is that if the world has reached out into the stars it has done so on the blood and bodies of the unfortunate and the vulnerable.

The film is, in that sense, bleak in a way the first isn’t. Dune Part One offered the hope of the defeat of the oppressors, it hung there on screen and in the story like the light at the end of the tunnel – making all the suffering meaningful or at least providing a catharsis which would help settle the scales.

Part Two turns that around and says to us that these promises are lies designed to make us acquiesce in our own subjugation. More prosaically it’s the boss saying you’ll get a payrise next year, that you’ll get that promotion if you work hard now. It’s every promise of accepting the shit sandwich today on the basis that tomorrow will be better.

And you know, sometimes shit sandwiches today do lead to better tomorrows but all too often people in power use that truth to serve their own ends. After all, they got powerful by making sure someone else eats the shit sandwich – namely you and not them.

The Fremen are those Paul co-opts, hating himself and his mother while he does it and, ultimately having lost his way entirely. The real tragedy of Dune is that both we, the audience, and Paul, the character know this is where he ends – in the loss of himself.

The film walks a careful line in bringing us a sense of justice done in the unfurling of Paul’s rise and conquering of his opponents but it does so by showing us how badly he disappears.

Chani tells him she will always love him as long as he remains himself.

He responds by justifying everything he does by claiming he’s still himself underneath that.

Except what good are hidden emotions and intentions when your actions are only what anyone sees?

All of this makes Paul sound like the villain but as one character says to another – there are no sides here.

In contrast to the Emperor and his fatally incompetent manoeuvring the Harkonnens are the physical antagonists forcing Paul to destroy everything in the name of freedom. As with everyone in this film they think they’re acting on their own desires but the truth of the matter is that the system itself has designs on them and their actions are little more than dances on the ends of someone else’s strings.

They are grotesque, sociopathic and cruel. They’re also arch capitalists. Take from that what you will. Their home planet is one filmed to echo footage of Nazi Germany with homogenous crowds worshipping their leader on pain of death and yet, it’s clear, the vast majority thrive under and actively support his reign.

They are both pantomime villains and deeply, profoundly evil.

It comes as no surprise then when, at the end, they are almost incidental to the resolution of Paul’s journey because the real power lies elsewhere – in the systems that make the Harkonnens, that make the Empire, possible.

What really matters here is that love has no place in the halls of power because it recalls us to our humanity and in Dune’s universe losing our humanity is the only way to survive, if such an existence can be called survival.

Villeneuve takes an interesting approach here to the nature of faith with some fairly blunt labelling of extremists and fanatics as exactly that. We’re never left in any doubt that religious fundamentalists are those who worship Paul Atreides as the messiah. It’s also pretty clear how these people are made not born, how empire provides the grounds for them to exist, feeds them, nurtures them and then sets them loose, only to act surprised at how they spiral out of control.

I’m unsure how I feel about this element of the story. Parts of it feel too on the nose even if no one gets out of this pure. When today’s world shows us how religious fundamentalism is an undying plague in both empires and democracies it feels a little unbalanced to suggest it is the oppressed noble savages who are uniquely susceptible to this kind of thinking.

Not that Villeneuve paints the Fremen as noble savages – they are a progressive society in many regards exactly until they encounter Paul and his mother Jessica who, for my money, is the film’s real villain.

They are also diverse in a way the empire isn’t. The Empire are the painfully white Harkonnens, the European aristocracy white of the Atreides and the American white of the Emperor. And in that Paul is absolutely the ‘white saviour’ of the Fremen.

The film addresses this in some fashion but ultimately the story is about how Paul takes over and ruins the Fremen because of, and supported by, a story concocted by his mother’s religious order so he can take the fight back to his fellow Europeans but with an army at his side of Brown bodies.

All his pained hesitancy aside, when Paul makes his choice he leans into it hard.

If I have any criticisms of Dune: Part Two it’s that it sometimes lacks emotional weight. There are numerous revelations and moments in the movie that, if it wasn’t so crushed trying to fit everything in, could have benefitted from room to breathe and space to establish the consequences emotionally and psychologically for different characters. As it is we’re told people are honourable rather than shown it, we’re told people will be hurt rather than shown it. It’s fine and understandable since the movie’s already nearly three hours long but it’s not great and speaks to a shallowness of human engagement that’s at odds with its clear-eyed political sensibilities.

Regardless of these shortcomings this is a fitting and triumphant sequel to the first movie. I’m not bothered about seeing more of this, even if it’s certain I’ll gladly watch both films again.

Verdict: Dune: Part Two rides off the nuance of Part One, fills out those messages and leaves us in no doubt that empires are bad for humans and we should, at all costs, find another way to be in community. I do not think we need a Dune Part Three to tell us these things all over again.

10 psychic babies out of 10

Stewart Hotston